# Leading NT Scholar Defends Same Sex Unions



## DMcFadden (Mar 6, 2008)

Dr. Timothy Luke Johnson, R. W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Candler School of Theology and a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University, is straightforward about why he supports same-sex unions: 



> I think it is important to state clearly that we do, in fact, reject the straightforward commands of Scripture, and appeal instead to another authority when we declare that same-sex unions can be holy and good. And what exactly is that authority? We appeal explicitly to the weight of our own experience and the experience thousands of others have witnessed to, which tells us that to claim our own sexual orientation is in fact to accept the way in which God has created us.
> 
> He is also realistic about the basis for his position, "We are fully aware of the weight of Scriptural evidence for pointing away from our position, yet place our trust in the power of the living God to reveal as powerfully through personal experience and testimony as through written texts."


OK, so now we have an "evangelical-friendly" scholar who has been a frequent contributor (and interviewee) in _Chrisitanity Today _explaining that we don't have to follow the Bible because we have another source of authority: experience. Wow! When pushed, he admits that this is not biblical. However, we "trust in the power of the living God to reveal as powerfully through personal experience and testimony as through the written texts." 

Personal experience and testimony are as powerful and authoritative as scripture? Yikes!!!


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## Presbyterian Deacon (Mar 6, 2008)




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## RamistThomist (Mar 6, 2008)

Not entirely similar, but enough to raise eyebrows
Chronology of the Controversy


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## Sonoftheday (Mar 6, 2008)

I loathe this kind of thinking. They try to sound Godly about it and that makes it worse. They say God reveals himself to us through experience as well as word and therefore we choose our experience over his word, its as bad as the millions of so called evangelicals who claim that God reveals himself through nature as well as scripture therefore scripture is wrong whenever it teaches a literal 7 day creation. These are blatant denials of Sola Scriptura, its this very thought process that opens the doors to every heresy under the sun. I mean at least Rome has the law of the church, it is damning but at least it is persistent, whenever you appeal to experience then everyone can and will create thier own God.


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## RamistThomist (Mar 6, 2008)

If we don't support civil same sex unions, then exactly how should the state oppose same sex unions? Just say, "No-no" ?


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## Presbyterian Deacon (Mar 6, 2008)

joshua said:


> SHOCK! SURPRISE! INCREDULITY!
> 
> 
> Nahh...not really.




More like
CONSTERNATION! FRUSTRATION! IRRITATION!


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## Poimen (Mar 6, 2008)

I want to make a statement:



> I appeal explicitly to the weight of my own experience and the experience thousands of others have witnessed to, which tells us that to claim homosexuality is wrong is in fact to accept the way in which God has created us.



There, I said it. I guess the debate is over.


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## Archlute (Mar 6, 2008)

I'll be the first to bet that pedophiles get warm fuzzies too....


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## DMcFadden (Mar 6, 2008)

Poimen said:


> I want to make a statement:
> 
> 
> 
> ...





Would you go so far as to say that "billions" testify that homosexuality is wrong on the same basis of authority?


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## Iconoclast (Mar 6, 2008)

Sometimes I have seen or heard people discussing what hell might be like, who will be there,etc.
When I see a supposed Dr. of theology like this;


> Dr. Timothy Luke Johnson, R. W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Candler School of Theology and a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University, is straightforward about why he supports same-sex unions:


 I think of these pronouncements as "voices from hell".These statements surely will not be heard,read or remembered in Heaven.
The flesh can attempt to study the bible, but at the end of the day the natural man cannot welcome the things of God.


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## Ivan (Mar 6, 2008)

> I think it is important to state clearly that we do, in fact, reject the straightforward commands of Scripture...



He lost me right from the start.


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## DMcFadden (Mar 6, 2008)

My point was not merely to parade the words of scoffing by a noted professor. Rather, this is a man who has been interviewed repeatedly by_ Christianity Today _and contributed articles to the famous evangelical publication.

It is rare to see someone who tries to appeal to conservatives, say something so baldly bad as to announce that our own experience can outweigh the testimony (and admittedly CLEAR teaching) of scripture!


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## RamistThomist (Mar 6, 2008)

At least he is honest. Many try to get around the thrust of the Bible by saying, "Oh, but that is for the Old Testament" or "Israel was a theocracy" or "Paul needs to be contextualized." 

In a strange sort of way, I respect (if somewhat loathe) Dr Johnson's honesty.


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## Stephen (Mar 6, 2008)

It is a matter of opinion whether he is the leading New Testament scholar. There are other men who are better scholars in this field. He certainly is not evangelical. Chandler has always been one of the most liberal schools in the country and is affiliated with the United Church of Christ, so this should be no surprise.


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## Pilgrim (Mar 6, 2008)

DMcFadden said:


> My point was not merely to parade the words of scoffing by a noted professor. Rather, this is a man who has been interviewed repeatedly by_ Christianity Today _and contributed articles to the famous evangelical publication.
> 
> It is rare to see someone who tries to appeal to conservatives, say something so baldly bad as to announce that our own experience can outweigh the testimony (and admittedly CLEAR teaching) of scripture!



If I recall correctly, Paul King Jewett, probably best known for his _Infant Baptism and the Covenant of Grace_ argued that Paul was wrong and inconsistent about women not speaking or teaching, etc. and appealed to Gal. 3:28 as overriding those statements. Near the end of his life I think he came to a position similar to what is described in the OP and we see in the following Piper sermon excerpt that he was thinking along those lines much earlier. 



> One of the things that makes matters unusual today is the effort on the part of some people to defend the legitimacy of homosexual behavior from the Bible. Most common, for example, is the claim that the denunciations of homosexuality in the New Testament are not references to committed, long-term homosexual relations, which these people say are legitimate, but rather refer to promiscuous homosexual relations and to pederasty, which are not legitimate. To use the words of one scholar, "What the New Testament is against is something significantly different from a homosexual orientation which some people seem to have from their earliest days. In other words, the New Testament is not talking about what we have come to speak of as sexual inversion. Rather, it is concerned with sexual perversion" (Paul Jewett, Interpretation, April, 1985, p. 210).



Hmm...slippery slope?

The Other Dark Exchange: Homosexuality, Part 1 :: Desiring God Christian Resource Library


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## DMcFadden (Mar 7, 2008)

Stephen said:


> It is a matter of opinion whether he is the leading New Testament scholar. There are other men who are better scholars in this field. He certainly is not evangelical. Chandler has always been one of the most liberal schools in the country and is affiliated with the United Church of Christ, so this should be no surprise.



Stephen, I would never call him THE leading NT scholar. The "headline" for the thread was "leading" as in the sense of "a leading . . ." In a later post I called him a "noted professor," which I think you will agree that he may be called. Obviously he should not be called evangelical in terms of his own beliefs. He was a Benedictine monk during the 60s and early 70s for instance!!! My descriptive was simply "evangelical friendly." How else does a person get into the pages of _Christianity Today _so often? They have printed his articles and interviewed him on numerous times. Maybe it was because he has been a noted critic of the Jesus seminar. But, CT seems to have a love affair with Johnson.


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## DMcFadden (Mar 7, 2008)

Pilgrim said:


> If I recall correctly, Paul King Jewett, probably best known for his _Infant Baptism and the Covenant of Grace_ argued that Paul was wrong and inconsistent about women not speaking or teaching, etc. and appealed to Gal. 3:28 as overriding those statements. Near the end of his life I think he came to a position similar to what is described in the OP and we see in the following Piper sermon excerpt that he was thinking along those lines much earlier.
> 
> Hmm...slippery slope?



Yeah, yeah, yeah. What do you expect from a Westminster Seminary trained theologian like Jewett? 

Chris, you are completely correct, and then some. Jewett was one of my profs in seminary. I objected to my wife and to friends back as early as '76 that Paul's hermeneutic in *Man as Male and Female* would, if he had enough time to develop it, lead him to embrace homosexual unions and ordination. It did not surprise me when his last book (*Who We Are: Our Dignity as Human* subtitled: "a neo-evangelical theology") included some rather bold statements about homosexuality.

Here is the fruit of Jewett's mature scholarship:



> "Something has to be wrong with teaching that evokes absolute hatred, loathing and disdain for homosexual people. We are left with the feeling that the church has overdone it, no matter how you cut it; and that homosexuals have certainly suffered more wrong than they have committed; and that there must be flaws in whatever theology of nature or hierarchy of sins has made homosexuality be viewed as the nadir of depravity (even as something was wrong with the theology of place that was used to justify the Crusades)."



BTW, in his *God, Creation, and Revelation* (the first volume of his sys theo), he defends the feminine pronoun for describing God. He resolved the awkwardness of he/she by speaking of God as "he" in some sections and "she" when dealing with "her" attributes (p. 45).

Sometimes I wonder if the Lord called him home so early (1991) before he could do any more work on his _magnum opus_. He certainly did much to stretch the broad evangelical movement into even wider territories.

Having examined hundreds of Fuller grads for ordination (300+?), I can testify to the fact that the seeds Jewett planted have grown into full bloom today. Several of my profs either taught, back in my day (75-77), or came to teach an overtly pro-gay position or a partial one, including Jack Rogers, Paul Jewett, Lewis Smedes, etc.


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## DMcFadden (Mar 7, 2008)

Commonweal - A review of religion, politics and culture

Here is another quote from Dr. Johnson's article.



> *Our situation vis-à-vis the authority of Scripture is not unlike that of abolitionists in nineteenth-century America*. During the 1850s, arguments raged over the morality of slave-holding, and the exegesis of Scripture played a key role in those debates. The exegetical battles were one-sided: all abolitionists could point to was Galatians 3:28 and the Letter of Philemon, while slave owners had the rest of the Old and New Testaments, which gave every indication that slaveholding was a legitimate, indeed God-ordained social arrangement, one to which neither Moses nor Jesus nor Paul raised a fundamental objection. *So how is it that now, in the early twenty-first century, the authority of the scriptural texts on slavery and the arguments made on their basis appear to all of us, without exception, as completely beside the point and deeply wrong? *
> 
> *The answer is that over time the human experience of slavery *and its horror came home to the popular conscience-through personal testimony and direct personal contact, through fiction like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and, of course, through a great Civil War in which ghastly numbers of people gave their lives so that slaves could be seen not as property but as persons. As persons, they could be treated by the same law of love that governed relations among all Christians, and could therefore eventually also realize full civil rights within society. And once that experience of their full humanity and the evil of their bondage reached a stage of critical consciousness, this nation could neither turn back to the practice of slavery nor ever read the Bible in the same way again.
> 
> Many of us who stand for the full recognition of gay and lesbian persons within the Christian communion find ourselves in a position similar to that of the early abolitionists-and of the early advocates for women’s full and equal roles in church and society. *We are fully aware of the weight of scriptural evidence pointing away from our position, yet place our trust in the power of the living God to reveal as powerfully through personal experience and testimony as through written texts. To justify this trust, we invoke the basic Pauline principle that the Spirit gives life but the letter kills (2 Corinthians 3:6)*. And if the letter of Scripture cannot find room for the activity of the living God in the transformation of human lives, then trust and obedience must be paid to the living God rather than to the words of Scripture.



Since Candler School of Theology, Emory University, is one of 13 seminaries of the United Methodist Church and "grounded in the Christian faith and shaped by the Wesleyan tradition of evangelical piety, ecumenical openness, and social concern," it should not be surprising that "experience" plays such a large part in their hermeneutic. Theoretically, Methodists believe in the authority of the Bible as the primary authority in the Church and using tradition, reason, and experience to interpret it.

If there was ever real-world evidence of the toxicity of a theology, it would be this one. Wesley, wrong as he was, would never countenance the kinds of statements being made in a school dedicated to training "Methodist" pastors.

However, the article offers a helpful insight into why Dr. Johnson has decided that "experience" trumps scripture. Hear him in his own voice:



> In my case, I trusted that God was at work in the life of *one of my four daughters*, who struggled against bigotry to *claim her sexual identity as a lesbian*. I trusted God was at work in the life she shares with her partner-a long-lasting and fruitful marriage dedicated to the care of others, and one that has borne fruit in a wonderful little girl who is among my and my wife’s dear grandchildren.



Cognitive dissonance strikes again!


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## Neopatriarch (Mar 7, 2008)

Ivanhoe said:


> If we don't support civil same sex unions, then exactly how should the state oppose same sex unions? Just say, "No-no" ?



How about criminalizing homosexuality? But it's probably too late for that.


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## DMcFadden (Mar 7, 2008)

I find it telling that Dr. Johnson was so forthright in his explanation for his position. Yes, the Bible denies what he affirms. Yes, his overturns millennia of consensus. "But, my daughter is a lesbian and she gave me this great little granddaughter. And, I know a lot of really sincere gay people."


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## DTK (Mar 7, 2008)

> OK, so now we have an "evangelical-friendly" scholar who has been a frequent contributor (and interviewee) in Chrisitanity Today explaining that we don't have to follow the Bible because we have another source of authority: experience. Wow! When pushed, he admits that this is not biblical. However, we "trust in the power of the living God to reveal as powerfully through personal experience and testimony as through the written texts."


This is not all that surprising coming from Timothy Luke Johnson. He's actually a liberal Roman Catholic. He was a Benedictine monk and priest before he took his teaching position at Candler School of Theology on the campus of Emory. 

DTK


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## Zenas (Mar 7, 2008)

They have itching ears.

"If you love me, then keep my commandments."


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## Civbert (Mar 7, 2008)

Ivanhoe said:


> At least he is honest. Many try to get around the thrust of the Bible by saying, "Oh, but that is for the Old Testament" or "Israel was a theocracy" or "Paul needs to be contextualized."
> 
> In a strange sort of way, I respect (if somewhat loathe) Dr Johnson's honesty.



I agree. Here we have someone who is honest about rejecting Scripture as "the whole counsel of God". He clearly states that God speaks even more powerfully to us "through personal experience and testimony". 



> (WCF 1:6) The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man’s salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men.



At least we know where Dr. Johnson stands. He's presuppositions are clearly and honestly given - that the 'collective wisdom' of man's experiences and common sense outweigh anything stated in the Bible. 

We need not except any of his conclusions since they follow from his presuppositions which are in contradiction to sola scriptura. 

So many others will give lip-service to Scripture, but hid the fact that they reject God's verbal revelation as supreme and foundational to man's knowledge and salvation. They will let "science" and "nature" trump Scripture where-ever it suits them - while still claiming to believe in the supremacy of Scripture. 

I wish more Christians were as honest as Dr. Johnson.


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## CDM (Mar 7, 2008)

Oh, look, another dog barked and we are outraged by it thread...


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## Reformed Covenanter (Mar 7, 2008)

Neopatriarch said:


> Ivanhoe said:
> 
> 
> > If we don't support civil same sex unions, then exactly how should the state oppose same sex unions? Just say, "No-no" ?
> ...



That would be a Biblical answer. Its not too late, as it would drive it underground - that is if criminalized and punished in the Biblical way.


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## DMcFadden (Mar 7, 2008)

mangum said:


> Oh, look, another dog barked and we are outraged by it thread...



Sorry, Chris, some of us are newer to the PB than others. I'm sure that it must get tedious for those who have been around for some time to keep hearing the same threads get revisited over and over and over and over and over again. Did I say that they get rehashed over and over and over and over and over again? Please be patient with us.


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## CDM (Mar 7, 2008)

DMcFadden said:


> mangum said:
> 
> 
> > Oh, look, another dog barked and we are outraged by it thread...
> ...


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## Amazing Grace (Mar 7, 2008)

DMcFadden said:


> Dr. Timothy Luke Johnson, R. W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Candler School of Theology and a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University, is straightforward about why he supports same-sex unions:



Just goes to show us that letters after a person's name mean nothing when schooled by the Holy Spirit through able teachers. I like watching Discovery when every person on is a biblical 'scholar". That title does not mean anything anymore. Spong, Funk, Crossan, and the irony is TLJ has criticized these 'scholars' of the Jesus seminar.....


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## Gryphonette (Mar 7, 2008)

How do you suppose these people get around that, AAMOF?

Certainly pedophilia is implicitly condemned in Scripture, but homosexuality is _explicitly_ condemned.

If the pedophile's experience tells him (or her) that sex with children is acceptable, what possible basis does Dr. Johnson have for telling him "Don't DO that! It's evil!"?


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## Civbert (Mar 7, 2008)

Gryphonette said:


> How do you suppose these people get around that, AAMOF?
> 
> Certainly pedophilia is implicitly condemned in Scripture, but homosexuality is _explicitly_ condemned.
> 
> If the pedophile's experience tells him (or her) that sex with children is acceptable, what possible basis does Dr. Johnson have for telling him "Don't DO that! It's evil!"?




He appeals to the "the experience thousands of others" as well as his own. Common consensus - that which tells us that homosexual acts are simply an alternative life-style. Very democratic.


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## RamistThomist (Mar 7, 2008)

If we are not going to bring concrete, measurable penal sanctions against the homosexual, then I don't really see why his statements are objectionable on one level (not referring to his anti-scripture remarks but merely to same sex unions).


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## Thomas2007 (Mar 7, 2008)

Ivanhoe said:


> If we are not going to bring concrete, measurable penal sanctions against the homosexual, then I don't really see why his statements are objectionable on one level (not referring to his anti-scripture remarks but merely to same sex unions).



We lost this battle in Loving v Virginia back in the late 1800's. A century from now they'll be looking at us, the same way most look at our ancestors of a century ago, saying "I can't believe they used to interpret the Bible that way."

I would expect that the critical schools will find that most of the verses that condemn this to be spurios in the future anyway. It's only been in the last decade or so that a different perspective on this verse has become clearer to me:

"I tell you, in that night there shall be two men in one bed; the one shall be taken, and the other shall be left." Luke 17:14


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## Dieter Schneider (Mar 8, 2008)

[video=youtube;rEMUn4KEVe8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEMUn4KEVe8[/video] is helpful.


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## DMcFadden (Mar 9, 2008)

Packer and Johnson both agree on what the Bible teaches, affirms, and implies about same-sex unions. But their disagreement on how to deal with that fact pushes each of them to opposite polarities.



> "I think it is important to state clearly that we do, in fact, reject the straightforward commands of Scripture, and appeal instead to another authority when we declare that same-sex unions can be holy and good . . . We appeal explicitly to the weight of our own experience and the experience thousands of others have witnessed to." - Johnson





> "I don't believe it, but I don't dare disbelieve it" - Packer



Packer represents classical Christianity. Johnson sounds like an example of the syndrome identified on a recent White Horse Inn, "I Come to the Garden Alone." My experience in all of its intrinsic subjectivity becomes decisive over the objective reality of the scriptural canon.


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